In the aftermath of the 2008 Financial Crisis, the private Federal Reserve bank cartel was front and center as a target for public outrage.

Former U.S. Congressman Ron Paul’s “End the Fed” message suddenly resonated. Americans hated Fed officials bailing out the banksters – richly rewarding them for crooked and irresponsible behavior which helped create the crisis.

But years have passed. Americans have been enjoying the expansion stage of the next great bubble. The central planners at the Fed and their colleagues at the nation’s largest banks have been busy stimulating the real estate, equity, and bond markets.

The movement to audit or end the Fed has faded back into obscurity.

That is why an article published last week in The Wall Street Journal came as a bit of a surprise. The headline is “We’ll Never Know How Bad the Federal Reserve Is,” and it serves as a reminder for those who may have forgotten the Fed is NOT your friend.

The article outlines the central bank’s policy for keeping secrets. As the primary regulator for U.S. banks, the Fed is responsible for examining banks and writing reports on what it finds.

However, those reports are not for public consumption. They are exempt from the Freedom of Information Act. Instead, they are kept in a file for 30 years, then destroyed.

Examiners might be investigating the errors and sins committed by a bank, but the public never gets to make their own evaluation. We cannot gauge either how thorough the investigation was or whether any penalties are commensurate with the crimes.

The reason for such secrecy is obvious. The Federal Reserve was designed and built to make sure neither its officials nor private bankers are held publicly accountable.

Time and again, America’s latest central bank has provided bailouts for Wall Street, with Main Street footing the bill. Not a single high-level bank executive has been prosecuted for the rampant and pervasive fraud associated with the 2008 crisis.

The big banks have prospered, growing larger and even more “systemically important,” a term which means “too big to fail.” As a regulator, the Fed is remarkable for its staggering ineptitude or for its total corruption. You decide which.

Meanwhile, politicians in Washington DC have been able to accelerate the growth of government spending, facilitated by the central bank in myriad ways.

Of course the central bankers will tell us that secrecy is important for “maintaining independence” and “security” of the markets. These claims that there is a legitimate need for secrecy would be slightly more credible if it were for a limited time.

That is not the case, however. The Fed is, in many regards, a virtual black box which shall remain closed for all time, at least if officials continue to have their way.

The most “interesting” works of the Wall Street elites in power there will never be published or examined. It is considered vital the public never knows about certain activities.

There is only one reason for that level of secrecy: We might object.

The fervor with which Fed officials oppose any attempt to bring more transparency and accountability is something Americans might now find familiar.

The central bank is another arm of the Deep State, much like the FBI and intelligence agencies.

We have learned a lot recently about what happens when entire bureaucracies operate in the dark and stop concerning themselves with the rule of law.

Senator Rand Paul is continuing his father’s effort to audit the Fed. Let us hope the developing outrage with the Deep State expands to include the central bankers.

Clint Siegner is a Director at Money Metals Exchange, the national precious metals company named 2015 “Dealer of the Year” in the United States by an independent global ratings group. A graduate of Linfield College in Oregon, Siegner puts his experience in business management along with his passion for personal liberty, limited government, and honest money into the development of Money Metals’ brand and reach. This includes writing extensively on the bullion markets and their intersection with policy and world affairs.

For two decades the offshoring of American jobs to Asia and Mexico has destroyed the careers and incomes of tens of millions of US citizens, the pension tax base for state and local governments, the federal tax base for Social Security and Medicare, and the opportunity society that once characterized the United States of America.

The rise in corporate profits that resulted from substituting foreign labor for American labor rewarded corporate executives and boards, hedge funds, large shareholders, and Wall Street with profits at the expense of the American population and the US economy.

The low rates of economic growth claimed since the alleged recovery from the 2008 financial crisis that resulted from financial deregulation, a huge mistake made by politicians in service to capitalist greed, is based entirely on under-measuring inflation. Allegedly, Americans have suffered no inflation for a decade, but anyone who buys anything knows that that is a lie. What jobs offshoring did is to destroy the growth in productivity based US consumer purchasing power that drove the US economy. In short, the short-sighted executives, boards, and Wall Street have impaired aggregate demand in the US.

The corrupt Federal Reserve under the incompetent Alan Greenspan ramped up consumer debt to take the place of the missing growth in consumer income. This works until consumers cannot carry any more debt. The subsequent Federal Reserve chairmen have kept the house of cards standing by pumping trillions of dollars into the prices of financial assets.

In my day such inappropriate Federal Reserve behavior would likely have been considered a felony. The Federal Reserve chairmen would possibly have been arrested and put on trial. In the least they would have been forced to resign for bailing out five banks at the expense of the US population.

As nothing was done, today we have financial asset prices based on money printing by the Federal Reserve and its accomplices—the Japanese central bank, the EU central bank, and the Bank of England. The financial criminality is worldwide.

As bad as the situation is, it is about to get worse. The same self-serving elites who told the insouciant American people that jobs offshoring would create more and better jobs for Americans are now telling them the same thing about robotics.

The accounting firm, PricewaterhouseCoopers, has been hired by someone to put out a “study” that robots will create more new jobs for displaced Americans then they will destroy. This lie will be repeated endlessly by the neoliberal economists and financial media, just as they repeated endlessly that jobs offshoring would do the same.

Having lost the manufacturing and professional skill jobs such as software engineering, robotics attacks the domestic service non-tradable jobs that could not be offshored, although some of them, such as nursing, could be filled by bringing in nurses on work visas under the false claim that there was a shortage of American nurses. Domestic service jobs have been approximately 90% or more of the new jobs for as long as I have reported on the jobs statistics, which is many years. Now, Americans are going to lose many domestic service jobs to robots.

Artificial intelligence is not necessary for robots to be programmed to do the domestic service jobs that are now the bulk of US employment. Moreover, the current level of robotics imposes the cost of doing business on the customer. If you doubt that, consider your experience the last time you tried to contact a service provider.

People are being made irrelevant. Before long, they won’t even know how to drive a car, because self-driving cars will take that function also away from them. The insouciant humans will sit there in the car being brainwashed by the propaganda from their video screens. They will cease to experience a human existence, and, thereby, will become disposable.

Other than disposing of them, how else do you get rid of millions of peoples who have no jobs to support them, peoples whose support are likely to be regarded as a dead-weight loss on the profits of the rich?

Robotics cannot possibly work for a humane society unless the means of production are socialized. Unfortunately, Western peoples are so brainwashed and insouciant that they are incapable of revolution.

Do you want to be erased? That is what American Capitalism is doing to you.

Russia is continuing to diversify state reserves away from US debt. The latest data from the US Treasury shows that Russia’s share hit an 11-year minimum and totaled only $14.9 billion.

The share of US sovereign debt bonds in Russia’s portfolio has been reduced dramatically in recent months. Russia held $96.1 billion in US Treasuries in March before selling half its holdings in April, dropping to 22nd place among major foreign holders of American treasury securities at $48.7 billion.

In 2010, Russia was among the top 10 holders of US Treasuries at $176.3 billion. With its holdings falling to $14.9 billion in May, the country is now below the $30 billion threshold for inclusion on the Treasury Department’s monthly report of major holders. On Tuesday, the Treasury released a list of 33 countries which includes the biggest holder China to the smallest Chile. Russia is no longer on the list.

A treasury bond is a fixed-interest government debt security with a maturity of more than 10 years. Treasury bonds make interest payments twice a year. The gradual sell-off of US sovereign debt started in 2011, and has intensified over recent years amid numerous rounds of sanctions imposed by the White House against Russia.

The head of the Central Bank of Russia (CBR) Elvira Nabiullina said in May that slashing of the holdings was result of the systematic assessment of all kinds of risks, including financial, economic and geopolitical.

Meanwhile, Russia’s gold holdings have been steadily increasing, bringing its share of the precious metal to its highest level in nearly two decades. Russia’s gold holdings in May grew by one percent to 62 million troy ounces, worth $80.5 billion, according to the CBR. According to Nabiullina, gold purchases helped to diversify reserves.

Global geopolitical conflicts along with trade tensions triggered by the US earlier this year have made some countries follow suit. Turkey nearly halved its US Treasury holdings from almost $62 billion in November to $32.6 billion in May. Germany has reduced its holdings from $86 billion in April to $78.3 billion in May.

Asked about Russia’s absence, a US Treasury spokesman said the Treasury market is the deepest and most liquid in the world, and demand remains robust, reports Bloomberg. He added that the department doesn’t comment on individual investors or investments.

Taxpayer contributions to pension plans have doubled in the past decade, but pension debt continues to increase.

After several years of steady investment growth and higher contributions from taxpayers, most of America’s public sector pension plans are still awash in red ink.

According to a new report from the Pew Charitable Trusts, the states collectively carry more than $1.4 trillion in pension debt—and only four states have at least 90 percent of the assets necessary to meet their long-term obligations to retirees. The Pew paper, which is based on states’ 2016 financial reports, shows that pension debt increased by about $295 billion since the previous year, making 2016 the 15th consecutive year in which state-level pension debt increased.

The really scary part is that pension debt keeps increasing despite the fact that taxpayers’ contributions to state-level pension plans have doubled as a share of state revenue in the past decade. Also worrisome: Pension plans are chasing increasingly risky investments. The gap between returns on safe investments and state pension plan investment assumptions was the highest in decades, the Pew researchers note, leaving pensions more vulnerable to market volatility and raising concerns that another downturn could drive already deeply indebted systems over a cliff.

Higher contributions from taxpayers and good returns in the market should bring well-structured pension plans back to good health. But only four states—New York, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Wisconsin—have at least 90 percent of the necessary assets to cover their retirement liabilities, Pew says.

Pew Charitable Trusts

There are two problems here. One is embedded in the very design of public sector pension plans. The other involves the politicians who are trusted to keep those plans funded properly.

Pictured above, the currency symbols for the old Spanish peseta and the Chinese yuan. Maybe Baba Beijing can synthesize the two of them into a cooling looking petro-yuan logo.

After 25 years of dreams, planning, rumors and testing, the Chinese petro-yuan is now official. Right now, almost all global oil trade is conducted in US dollars, using two benchmark varieties of crude, West Texas Intermediate and North Sea Brent, as the industry standards. It is no accident that these two benchmarks are based on imperial crude, American and British, and the irony of this is surely not lost on Baba Beijing (China’s leadership).

China is not selling oil, so the petro-yuan is a futures purchase contract denominated in renminbi for the country to import the stuff. As the world’s biggest importer of hydrocarbons, Baba Beijing has long felt that pricing all its millions of tons of imports should be in its national currency. Why should China pay for Russian natural gas or Venezuelan crude in Western empire’s currency of global financial control, Uncle Sam’s greenback?

Opinions outside China range from being non-plussed, to claiming it is the most important news in modern financial history, but you would have to search far and wide in Eurangloland (NATO, EU, Israel, Australia and New Zealand) and its heavily censored and suppressed media, to see for yourself. Outside the obligatory statement of fact in financial outlets like the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Reuters and Bloomberg, silence from the West’s mainstream media is deafening, as this screenshot below shows, when searching the topic. Only one mainstream article showed up on page #1 of the web search and that was CNBC from 2017. Even just looking for “petro-yuan” gives identical results. It’s a Western media black hole.

The West’s censorship and suppression of news that reports the truth about China, Russia and Iran is lethally effective. Hitler called it the Big Lie. Eurangloland learned from a master.

Both end points on the above range of ideas are probably exaggerated. But, the fact that any global oil seller can now buy non-US dollar oil contracts is momentous, for sure. In 1971, Richard Nixon took the US dollar off the gold standard and got OPEC to restrict global hydrocarbon sales to greenbacks. Thus, overnight, the world’s reserve currency was pure fiat money, which is still being kept propped up by the need for the world economy to buy dollars, in order to purchase the most strategic commodity on earth. Here are two ranges of opinion on Nixon’s decision (from this to this).

Other, more powerful oil producers have already ditched the greenback, but Western empire only knows how to prey on weaker states, like Grenada, Panama, Serbia, Africa and the like. Iran has already stopped using the US dollar, as has Russia with China, which helps explain the West’s vociferous, self-defeating illegal sanctions and embargos on them.

Both Iran and Russia make Uncle Sam brown the backside of his red-white-and-blue bloomers, as well as for the Zionist state of Israel. I don’t even have to mention Eurangloland’s white knuckle fear of China. The China-Russia-Iran anti-dollar alliance versus the West is causing the latter’s elites to suffer from extreme geopolitical dysentery. Vulnerable, and it has to be said gullible Iraq and Libya, yes – but this towering trio not so much, as they are two of the world’s biggest petro-exporters next door to the biggest importer, and all are armed to the teeth with high-tech military hardware. When you look at the map below, it graphically shows how ridiculous it is for these three players to do business in dollars. New York and Washington are so far, far away.

Whatcha gonna do about it, Eurangloland? There’s not a damn this you can do, short of destroying humanity and the world. Sadly, there are many psychopaths in Washington, Brussels, London and Paris who would prefer that, than accept imperial collapse.

As usual, you have to go outside the Great Western Firewall and its propaganda Big Lie, to see the real world. For those who want to delve deeper, RT has done an informative series of articles and the South China Morning Post (SCMP) has done a couple of good ones.

The Great Depression will pale in comparison to the next financial crisis which could soon be coming, according to investor Peter Schiff, famous for his doomsday predictions.

“The bad news is, we are going to live through another Great Depression and it’s going to be very different. This will be in many ways, much much worse than what people had to endure during the Great Depression,” Schiff said, as quoted by ZeroHedge. “This is going to be a dollar crisis.”

According to Schiff, the US Federal Reserve is propping up the markets to urge people to spend more, but in fact, the wealth created is a bubble.

“It’s actually doing damage. If you create a bunch of phony wealth, and people end up spending money that they otherwise would have saved, you are undermining economic growth,” he said.

In January, Schiff predicted that “the economy is going to blow up like a bomb” because of the Federal Reserve policy, but President Donald Trump will be to blame.

“Unfortunately, that’s what Trump has inherited from Obama. But it’s not even really just Obama, it’s the Federal Reserve. It’s the monetary policy that has been passed like a baton from Clinton to Bush to Obama and now to Trump. And we’re near the end of the game and unfortunately, Trump’s gonna be the fall guy. This thing is all gonna collapse while he’s president,” Schiff said. The tax cuts will give the Democratic Party a reason to blame the collapse all on Trump and the Republicans, the investor added.

The collapse of the petrodollar has been predicted and delayed as much as possible. The resurrection of the gold standard, on the other hand, is coupled with the rise of a basket of sovereign currencies that are backed up, not by wars of coercion, but by tangible sovereign assets.

All of these were mixed with the epic downfall of the Deep State controlled countries’ reputation abroad that serves as the primary catalyst of the decisive rise of PetroYuan.

Enough time has already been given as the first open talk about the global reset happened a decade ago, or in the immediate aftermath of the WTC false flag, which purposely deterred the announcement of the recovery of the Asian Global Accounts that had been backing up the financial system of the West.

Today, we are just mere days from its inauguration, but the Shanghai Futures Exchange is evidently up to a good start that is sending jitters across the US and EU, which explains their bad behavior as of late.

We are now in the final phase of the global effort to rid of the warmongering cabal that has been having its heyday for half a millennia, at least.

Although it has the potential to be chaotic as it unfolds, but the impending US economic collapse is the necessary trigger that would force the armed militias to take over their government and reestablish their once lost American Republic.

In order to gauge how bad the situation is beginning to be, here’s the MIT president Rafael Reif greeting his generous benefactor.

According to the Guardian,

“Last weekend, while media attention was focused on the March for Our Lives protests across America, a militarised police force blocked the road leading up to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab, one of the university’s most famous laboratories, for a special guest. The guest – the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman – visited both Harvard and MIT on his first official tour of the US. Saudi officials boasted about the visit, posting photos of Bin Salman with both Harvard provost Alan Garber and MIT president Rafael Reif on social media.

Yet both universities have been remarkably silent about the prince’s presence. Neither university publicly announced his visit in advance, and steps were even taken to cover it up. For instance, the Media Lab’s students were sent an email informing them that access to the lab would be restricted, with metal detectors – with no mention as to why. A small protest staged by an anti-war group was the only public indication of Bin Salman’s visit to campus. MIT and Harvard only acknowledged it had taken place afterwards, in response to inquiries by student newspapers and through a press release that didn’t adequately explain the implications of the partnership.”